The Challenge of Processing Jesus' Family Tree

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a Christmas party with numerous close friends through my parish and/or diocesan involvement over the years. I stepped away for a moment, and when I returned, there was a lively discussion about the genealogy of Jesus in full swing. As I recall, there was reference to Matthew 1:1-17, the line of Jesus’ ancestors. The Matthean genealogy is heard once a year as the Advent weekday reading for December 17, and several of the guests attend daily Mass and had some exposure and knowledge of the actual text.
 
Matthew lists forty-two generations dating back to Abraham. This succession text is also assigned to the Vigil Mass[es] of Christmas, i.e., the supper hour and early evening Christmas Eve Mass, but pastors are allowed to switch the four sets of Christmas Mass readings. [Well, let's just say we did it.] Just about every church does this today, and you can’t blame anyone. Reading the 42 names at a Mass filled with children awaiting Santa? You get the picture. What has evolved [rather quickly] since the 1970 Missal was released is the practice of proclaiming Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth as the standard Christmas Gospel at all the feast’s Masses—vigil, midnight, morning, daytime--even though Luke’s manger scene in Bethlehem is officially designated as the Mass during the night, i.e., Midnight Mass.
 
The collection of late Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Mass Scripture readings can be confusing, historically and doctrinally. We had the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and I am reasonably certain that based upon the Gospel for this feast [Luke’s narrative of the Angel Gabriel’s message to Mary], most Catholics believe that the term “Immaculate Conception” applies to Jesus’ coming into the world. In truth, the feast celebrates God’s intervention in Mary’s conception: that God preserved her, and her alone, from inheriting the sin of Adam and Eve, or what we refer to as original sin. The early Church Fathers, notably St. Augustine, held that original sin was passed along carnally, through intercourse. The miracle here is that God intervened and preserved Mary from original sin, rendering her a future fitting mother for the Savior of the world. There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that Mary herself was not conceived in the natural way.
 
Mary’s Immaculate Conception is a matter of faith, formally declared a doctrine of the Church in 1854 by Pope Pius IX. The doctrine evolved from centuries of the Church’s attempts to grasp the essence and language of the miracle that is the Incarnation, at least to the limit of what any human can understand. The Immaculate Conception is indeed one of those official beliefs enhanced by the piety of two millennia of believers who instinctively believed that the mother of the Redeemer must be worthy to receive the divine Christ into her womb. It can be confusing that the assigned Gospel for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is Luke 1: 26-37, which describes the Annunciation narrative involving Gabriel and Mary. This Lukan text is also the Gospel for the Mass of March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas.]  The Feast of the Immaculate Conception [December 8] is celebrated nine months before the Nativity of Mary [September 8]. Church devotion to Mary, I believe, is inspired by Mary’s obedience—though it is fascinating to observe that Mary had several questions for Gabriel before she gave her assent. Her questions reflected Jewish law and practice, not personal obstinacy.
 
While we’re on the topic of the genealogy and Mary’s role in the unfolding of the Incarnation, it is important to add that one of the oldest Marian doctrines is her perpetual virginity. I found a summary that explains the doctrine well:
 
The teaching of Mary’s perpetual virginity is one of the longest defined dogmas of the Church. It was taught by the earliest Church Fathers, including Tertullian, St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine. And it was officially declared a dogma at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 553 A.D. That declaration called Mary ‘ever-virgin.’ A century later, a statement by Pope Martin I clarified that ‘ever-virgin’ meant Mary was a virgin before, during, and after Christ’s birth. Of those three aspects of Mary’s perpetual virginity, the easiest part to see in Scripture is her virginal conception of Christ. Both Matthew and Luke leave no room for doubt on that (Mt 1:18; Lk 1:34–35, 3:23). That virginal motherhood is the guarantor of both Jesus’ divinity and Jesus’ humanity. It safeguards the truth that he was both fully God and fully man.
 
Expressing infinite divine truth through the medium of imperfect human language is impossible; hence, Catholics believe that the four evangelists were themselves inspired to describe the Incarnation and the Redemption as best they could. In the last century, we have come to understand that the Gospel writers were not simply recording secretaries of mysterious divine voices. While their texts are outlined around the historical Jesus, they wrote for four distinct audiences or needs of their time, emphasizing, arranging, and highlighting material appropriate to their understanding and the needs of the Church in their time and place. In short, they were theologians who unfolded the meaning of Christ’s word and works. As befits all human writers, they made non-doctrinal errors, but the Church teaches that everything we need to know of God’s plan is contained between the covers of the Bible, and the meaning and message of Jesus is there for us to embrace.
 
Two Gospels—Mark and John—begin with the adult baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist and/or the call of the twelve disciples.
 
ABOUT MATTHEW’S GENEALOGY OF JESUS:
 
I noted earlier that each evangelist composed his Gospel at a different time, in a different geographic setting, say Palestine or Rome, and to specific issues or events. Mark, for example, is the only evangelist to write before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and he did so on its heels in the late 60’s. His is an apocalyptic text, future oriented and warning of taking up the cross before it is too late.
 
The later Gospels were written in the 80’s A.D., St. John’s possibly as late as 100 A.D. What would have motivated St. Matthew to write his Gospel narrative? One of his primary goals was to establish for future generations that Jesus was the new Moses, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scripture promises. One of the best theories about Matthew’s Gospel is its intent to keep Jewish converts to Christianity from defecting back to Judaism when Romans persecuted Christians with vigor at times. Matthew was faced with the challenge of maintaining reverence for Abraham and particularly Moses, “The Law Giver,” while making the case that God had fulfilled the Old Testament promises by sending his son, Jesus, who delivered a new and eternal basis for Biblical law. Contrast Moses’ Ten Commandments with Jesus’ Eight Beatitudes, both revealed on a mountain top.
 
The Paulist Biblical Commentary notes that “biographies of famous persons in the ancient world [Alexander the Great being a typical example] frequently begin with a description of their birth and childhood. Such accounts highlight aspects of their early years that point to future status and accomplishments.” [p. 910] Matthew elected to open his narrative with a genealogy of Jesus, establishing his Jewish bloodline back to Abraham. This is a contrast to Luke’s Gospel, which also contains a genealogy in Chapter 4 but begins not with Abraham but with Adam—the man in the Garden of Eden. Luke’s arrangement is appropriate with his Gospel’s theme of Jesus as a universal savior.
 
Matthew’s choice of beginning with Abraham reflects the thrust of this entire Gospel. You may be wondering—correctly—how anyone’s bloodline can be accurately traced over two thousand years, and the simple answer is that it can’t. Matthew’s genealogy is not recorded in any other Biblical book in this form. The footnote in the 1970 NAB [New American Bible, a Catholic enterprise] comments that “The genealogy is probably traditional material that Matthew edited.” The NAB notes, too, that with three exceptions, the final thirteen names closest to Jesus’ birth appear in no other Old Testament genealogy. “The women Tamar, Rahab and Ruth, and the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba, bore their sons through unions that were in varying degrees strange and unexpected. These ‘irregularities’ culminate in the supreme ‘irregularity’ of the Messiah’s birth of a virgin mother; the age of fulfillment is inaugurated by a creative act of God.” [Matthew 1, NAB]
 
The 1970 NAB comments on the arrangement in Matthew’s genealogy that it is consistent with the author’s unique thinking: the names are listed in three distinct clusters of fourteen names each. “Matthew is concerned with fourteen generations, probably because fourteen is the numerical value of the Hebrew letters forming the name of David, the famous king of a millennium past. If a reader should miss the nuances of Matthew’s work, the author himself calls attention to his literary handiwork in 1:17.
 
Matthew’s entire Christmas narrative strives to bring into focus the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth as the true Son of God yet born into the heart of the Hebrew faith. Joseph, husband of Mary, was not simply a warm body in this narrative. Something we Catholics overlook is the fact that in the narrative of Matthew, it is Joseph to whom the angel explained Mary’s divine maternity. Joseph is told to give the child his name. It is Joseph who is warned by the angel to take the child and his mother to Egypt and later is told by the same angel when it is safe enough to settle in Galilee. It is Matthew’s way of saying that despite the virginal conception of Mary’s child, Joseph was a true Jewish father of his son.